I'm using both Gitlab and Github for different projects, and I just can't stand Gitlab's interface. Informations are scattered all around the place and there's no distinctive way of finding the information you want. Plus it's slow as hell.

Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.

I agree. I couldn't stand the slowness of Gitlab's UI. I originally came to Gitlab because Bitbucket was lagging on several features that I wanted, and had a poor UI. Gitlab's UI seemed more inviting as it was similar to Github. Mostly though, I chose Gitlab for the free private repositories.

The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).

I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.

It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.

yeah, gitlab _is_ slow. Given that they are (unlike github) actually making money I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem (or put some devs on fixing their backend).

> I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem

There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.

> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)

We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25421/

There's also this old (and closed) issue which contains a lot of information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

Are you using GitLab.com or hosting it yourself? We're working on improving GitLab.com, but self-hosting GitLab should be pretty fast in most circumstances.

As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.

I can't speak for other browsers, but keeping a GitLab tab open in a background tab consistently causes my CPU dedicate 15-25% of its cycles to Firefox.

I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."

The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.

Mmm, I found https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/521 but that was a Firefox bug. It is probably something in GitLab but I'm not sure someone filed a bug report for it. We have complete UX and frontend teams and at this moment all the views should work great, also on mobile. GitLab self-hosted should be fast but we're working on the speed of GitLab.com.

Here's another issue about Firefox using 100% CPU https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/342

Searching an issue number in the list page's text input should take me to the issue. Sounds small but it's a frequent irritation; I will be 200% happier with Gitlab once it's solved, and my teammates even more so.

Hi throwanem. This is an excellent idea. I've created an issue about it in GitLab's issue tracker so we can move forward with it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25771

Thanks!

If you have Alfred, you can set up a custom web search since issue numbers are in the URL. I have tons of these set up to get to different repos, my global list of PRs, etc. It's that much faster because you don't even need to open a browser or navigate to the page to type in a search field.

Interesting idea, but it doesn't really fit my use case, because I always have a tab open on the issues list page for each project on which I'm working at a given time. When I want to open tabs for issues of present interest, as when reviewing for deployment or preparing a changelog update, it'll be a lot more convenient to do so by searching issue numbers and middle-clicking their entries in the result, rather than the current method of copying a URL to an issue page, then doing C-TAB C-l C-v <end> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> 1 2 3 RET with as many issue numbers as I have in hand to deal with.

We would love to learn what we can do to continue to improve the GitLab experience. Is there a specific type of information you are having a hard time finding? Or is it about the overall information hierarchy? Feel free to make an issue if that is easier (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new) or comment on this issue we are using to learn from this thread (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752). Thanks for the feedback!

You can really improve the GitHub issue board experience with tools like ZenHub [1] - which is further ahead than the GitLab project management experience. This extra functionality is really needed in order to get the PM's buy in to switch from Jira.

The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)

[1] https://www.zenhub.com/